Azure Synapse provides: dedicated SQL pools (MPP data warehousing with T-SQL), serverless SQL pools (query data lake without provisioning), Spark pools (big data processing with PySpark/Scala), and Synapse Pipelines (ADF-compatible orchestration). Synapse Studio provides a unified development experience across all compute types.
With Microsoft Fabric's launch, many Synapse capabilities are being absorbed into Fabric (Data Factory, Lakehouse, Warehouse, Notebooks). New greenfield projects should evaluate Fabric first. Existing Synapse environments should plan migration timelines based on feature parity, which Xylity helps assess.